d-i, FAI, quik-installer for oldworld, debconf4

[Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.de>]

Hello everybody,

I thought, it would be a good idea to tell you my motivations participating in 
d-i work. One simple reason to help is to get sarge released ASAP! ;-)

Then, I'm also interested in fully automatic installations with FAI 
(www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai or packages.d.o/fai), lately focussed on 
multiple arch support (www.layer-acht.de/fai). 

At the moment FAI is mainly used on i386, with some success stories on sparc, 
ia64 and powerpc. Since FAIs design is architecture independent (the only 
special requierement is nfsroot) it should be possible to extend the support 
to all eleven (or 12) architectures Debian supports. FAI uses debootstrap 
(architecture independent) and shell/perl scripts for partitioning the hard 
disks and making them bootable (these scripts are i386/ia64/ppc spezific at 
the moment).

When d-i is working better for my hardware (which means oldworld and newworld 
installs and boots without problems) I want to take parts of d-i and 
integrate them into FAI replacing some scripts FAI uses. But I'm not sure how 
to do this now: (how) can I install .udebs onto a normal debian system (the 
nfsroot used by FAI) ?

At debconf4 I'll try to find some people to get FAI ported to more archs and 
to integrate the d-i efforts into FAI. More details to follow.

I would like to start hacking a quik-installer (for oldworld powerpc) now, but 
I am a little unsure how to test it on my own: Since my only oldworld system 
to develop with is a pmac4400 at the moment I have to boot if from floppies. 
Then I'll usually insert the net-drivers floppy and install from a 
debian-mirror (which includes daily built d-i packages). Should/can I use the 
cd-drivers floppy and build my own cd-iso-image, which will then include my 
unsubmitted new code ??


regards,
	Holger